Impressive how well this matches the original on Amiga, which is one of the really great demos on that platform. Thus the same design and structure works just as well here, and the sizecoding aspect of the soundtrack and effects of course is a noteworthy achievement. I feel this was a response to the Second Reality "shader port", but unlike that lackluster effort this actually was the more perfectionist approach to the same concept.

Despite all the glory I'd like to say that this is not the best remake of all time in every way, because the C64 Second Reality had better music than the original, in some ways. (which was an incredible feat)

A note on how the music for this production came to be.
We started off with the original 4ch track, which of course had several instruments in each track. Blueberry rendered a new Renoise-file that split each instrument into it's own seperate track, which made the conversion a lot easier.

From there - one sample at a time was replaced with an instrument using the new custom synth. The synth itself was built to be able to create exactly the instruments needed in this production, and particularly the percussions were all important.

I replaced the samples one by one, by adding an extra track next to the sample-track, to better be able to check if similarity was as intact as possible. I started with the drums/percussions and kept the basslines and melody samples as long as possible, so I could get a feeling on how the drums worked in combination with "the real" basses, leads and strings.

Of course, the pattern effects were the thing causing us the biggest problem recreating. Particularly the volume slides, pitch slides and portamento is excessively used (like in most proper 4ch tracks of that age) but with a bit of tinkering with a narrow band filter that swept from high to low frequency, it gave the impression of a pitch-glide. It's not entirely perfect, but it got as close as it could.

After about 20-30 iterations of the trak, we finally had a version with only synth instruments that would actually play in the intro. However, the size was HUGE, so the tedious work of reducing size started.

First off - I identified the instruments, that could replace others - I.e. there's three claps/snares in the original. That was reduced to a single instrument, that when played at different pitch and velocity, was "close enough (tm)" to the original.

Also the note data itself wasn't exactly optimal. The hihat "skipped" a note every now and then (due to the 4 channel limitation of the original, naturally) which completely broke the patterns that would pack nicely. So most of the percussion were recreated in a way, I'm sure Interphace would have wanted it, had he had the liberty of more than 4 channels. This made the song data pack a LOT better.

Blueberry added quantization of parameters in the synth, giving us yet another size-win at the cost of slightly reduced quality of each instrument.

After another 15-20 iterations, we kinda hit the absolute bare bone of the music, but still more cuts were needed to get the size further down. This was where the biggest corners were cut, and I had to find a plausible compromise between the original and our version.

When we finally had a size, that would work for the intro, the final mixing were done, adjusting the volume of each instrument to fit the final song. A problem in the synth (causing the Poo-Brainque 4k intro to sound terribly wrong - sorry, guys!) was identified, and a couple of last-minute iterations had to be done in a hurry to fix the problem. That's the reason the party-version was in mono!

I believe the music went through 62-63 iterations to get to the final version. Whenever Blueberry decides to release the synth, I'd be happy to provide anyone who's interested, with all the different steps of the music.

Thumb up for the amount of work (and thanks Punqtured for the interesting write-up!), but in the end it's only a remake going for the popularity of the original prod with (almost) no creativity of your own. :-/

Kyleran: I'm inclined to not buy in on the "no creativity of your own"-statement. Of course it's true in the sense, that the content was already laid out and we knew exactly what needed to be done. However, when it comes to the way a given effect could be achieved, given the size limitations, an enormous amount of creativity is needed. So only in the sense that "creativity" is considered the proces of choosing which effects to use and in what order, you're right :)

Obviously a great amount of skill is needed to achieve something like this, for me that needed a creative approach to make it work as Punqtured just described.

Not only did the coding skills impress me, but the music remake was also brilliantly done. I totally enjoyed watching this, and I take it as a homage to the original while still demonstrating a high level of skill and creativity to realise it in 8k.

Excellent implementation, but conceptually this leaves me pretty cold. I think that even a direct remake should have something that's unique to itself, some improvement or design or own voice or something. I can understand the fact of porting "down" (like the C64 version of Desert Dream) carries a lot of technical difficulty. This? I am not so sure. It doesn't feel that way to me, although of course there are probably lots of technical challenges here. It looks like the amiga demo to me and I've already seen it.

@Punqtured: I realize that you need a lot of technical creativity to pull this off, fighting the constraints imposed by the size-limit. As a coder for an oldschool platform, I know that all too well. But even when redoing a traditional effect, I expect there to be at least a small amount of artistic creativity as well. To me, a demo should be more than just technology, it's about the synergy of technical achievements and artistic decisions, and the latter is what I'm missing here.

It seems I forgot the thumb up that I mentioned in my last comment for the amount of work, so here it is, now also for the technical creativity. :)

Regarding the design and improvements, I think Nexus 7 represents the pinnacle of the classical era, including it's very clean look, and that it doesn't try do things the hardware can't do well enough to actually look good (maybe except the resolution on the motion blur part). This is why it's such classic compared to other demos that may have been even more popular back then.

So even if there had been space for it, we really didn't want to change that clean look, and for instance adding postfx would seem very wrong (though I would have liked a post pass just to do a gamma curve for the additive particles).
We had to somewhat redesign parts to fit the 16:9 aspect (for instance the balls are bouncing at twice the period due to the longer travel) and we have lifted limitations where it made sense (much like what punqtured wrote about 4ch limiitations). When the galaxy is no longer an animation it doesn't have to be that small and repeating, we could do real volumetrics and shading for the disco ball, the scroller can be properly shaded etc. And otherwise kept it at subtle improvements like AO for the natural motion part (it just looked too 90s without it while the rest IS more contemporary).

Hyde: Really glad you liked it (and that we managed to get hold of at least you and Archmage in time for the compo). For the natural motion, Blueberry reverse engineered both the data and the code interpreting it, and then there was a lot of cleanup, rearranging and simplification going on, reducing it to around 250 bytes, while the shader code can share bezier interpolation with the pictures etc.

After the two parts we saw from Blueberry in the shader showdown, I jokingly asked him how long until he's gonna do the rest of nexus 7. His reply was something along the lines of "I don't think that should take very long".

I didn't expect this at all. You glorious bastards. If I could give this two thumbs, I would.

@Punqtured: great work in the sound track! Having been on a few byte hunts with blueberry in the past I can say it's a lot of fun.

The rest of the team bloody great job. It is massively creative at a technical level. Its one thing to get that much content in 8k but it's entirely another thing having to recreate something else scene for scene!

LordHelmet: You are welcome. The most common complaint from people we talked to after the compo was those missing fuckings, so we sought to rectify that omission by mentioning you at the prizegiving. :)

LordHelmet: You are welcome. The most common complaint from people we talked to after the compo was those missing fuckings, so we sought to rectify that omission by mentioning you at the prizegiving. :)

I guess I'll have to show my ignorance by asking this; why did lord helmet get fuckings in the original anyway?

I strongly dislike these recreation efforts, unless they bring something new to the table and transcend the nostalgia circle jerk of middle-aged computer people who ran out of spirit and ideas decades ago.

Now, this is very well executed, but it certainly does not make any attempt to transcend anything. Old stuff re-iterated, again. I hope we are not stuck in an infinite feedback loop by the time this scene really dies.

Would win the Demo Remake Compo and the Most Ballsy Content Reuse In Another Compo Compo fur sure, if those existed ;)

Apart form that I'm a bit torn. Call me a philistine but I never got Nexus 7's appeal in the first place compared to a lot of other Amiga demos of the time so this remake left me pretty cold - on the other hand I can only respect the attention to detail and the sheer amount of content you managed to squeeze into 8K. So yay :)

Loved it at first sight, loved the remake. Has made my day when I saw it live on the big screen. You guys have my deepest respect. Considering that Blueberry had an masterplan here, starting with his shader codings, finished off at prizegiving with that Lord Helmet ode, I have to say this is really genious stuff. In every way.

This is really awesome. Splendid work everyone involved!
I am a bit ashamed of having won against this with my 60%-effort (my intro is still totally unfinished and was partycoded!) and want to apology!

I think the effects didn´t work too well in 2016...and maybe some of the voters felt that letting win a remake would only yield more remakes in next years compos...which would be cool somehow, but also ain´t exactly what we invented 8k for!
But for the effort alone you should have won, sorry again! ;)

Music is really well done, sounded even a bit better than the original!
Effects are all ported very nicely and i love the fact you didn´t kill em with newskool-postFX to the max!
Graphics...well, it´s just that one picture, but it looks really good for you having had to cram it inside the 8k somehow!
Timing is perfect!
♥

A big resounding "meh" for the arguments about lack of creativity or artistry. There's nothing wrong with going for the technical challenge rather than the artistic one and it's clear that there's plenty of that right here. Not effects-wise but packing all that faithfully remade content in 8k is impressive in itself.

Like many others here I was blown away by the accuracy of the scenes as well as the music remake. I was chuckling with delight during the entire screening of the prod, and still did afterwards. Easily one of my favourite prods of Revision 2016.

Nice remake, as a musician ofcourse amazed, how close you've got to the original in such a small size. The effects are also proper remake of the original one, big up for that. The Andromeda logo doesn't look authentic though :)

Yes, as mentioned in the nfo, we dropped support for d3dcompiler_43, since it takes more than 10 minutes to compile our shader.

If you want to run the intro on Windows 7, simply copy d3dcompiler_47.dll from C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer to the intro directory, or to C:\Windows\SysWOW64, and you are set. That takes significantly less than 10 minutes. :)